Wirelessly Activated Facial Recognition with a Raspberry Pi, Camera and RTL-SDR Dongle

Over on his blog and YouTube channel Trevor Phillips has shown us how he's created a wirelessly activated facial recognition system using a Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi camera, wireless button and RTL-SDR dongle.

He uses a handicap door button with wireless transmitter that transmits at 300 - 390 MHz, and uses the RTL-SDR on the Raspberry Pi Zero to detect whenever the button is pressed. The button detection algorithm simply looks for an increase in RF energy via an FFT transform. Once a button press is detected by the RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi the camera and facial recognition software on the Pi activate, and a text to speech algorithm asks the button presser to face the camera for identification. If the face is recognized in the database the speech to text welcomes the user.